Flex

Flex presentation:

Flex is a Lexer generator written in C. On Tiger we had a wrapper to make it work in C++ name Flex++. Flex provides a special syntax to write lexers simply. Flex is a very old tool based on Lex.

Flex is based on Lex:

The original paper on Lex:

Lesk, M. E. and E. Schmidt [1975].

Lex: A Lexical Analyzer Generator. Computing Science Technical Report No. 39, Bell

Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Why is Flex no longer in Tiger?

Since the inception of the project the Flex tool was used and was replaced in 2023 by .

RE/Flex is based on modern C++ and fixes many of Flex’s problems and generates cleaner code.

It retains backwards compatibility with Flex and also integrates easily with Bison. Flex has the shortcoming of generating unreadable C code that is difficult to debug.

Resources about Flex: